Syria after Assad: a question for Avot

At Avot 3:2, Rabbi Chanina segan HaKohanim teaches:

הֱוֵי מִתְפַּלֵּל בִּשְׁלוֹמָהּ שֶׁל מַלְכוּת, שֶׁאִלְמָלֵא מוֹרָאָהּ, אִישׁ אֶת רֵעֵֽהוּ חַיִּים בְּלָעוֹ

Pray for the integrity of the government; for were it not for the fear of its authority, a man would swallow his neighbour alive.

Few readers of Avot Today will have missed the news of the remarkable developments in Syria, where President Assad’s much hated but hitherto unassailable regime has been swept aside. In its place there has emerged a coalition of forces that share some aims but are themselves in conflict over others.

What are the stated objectives of the successful forces? According to an early statement we learn the following:

"After 50 years of oppression under the regime, and 13 years of crime, tyranny and displacement, and after a long struggle and fight and confronting all forms of occupation forces, we announce today on 12-8-2024 the end of this dark era and the beginning of a new era for Syria.

To the displaced all over the world, free Syria awaits you”.

This new Syria is declared to be a place where everyone

."…coexists in peace, justice prevails and rights are established, where every Syrian is honoured and his dignity is preserved, we turn the page on the dark past and open a new horizon for the future."

These are noble aspirations, but is there any prospect that they will be delivered? Success has come through the cooperation between numerous factions which, though united in their determination to force a regime change, are themselves deeply divided along political, religious and ethnic lines.

Though Syria has been technically at war with Israel since 1948, the Assad regime agreed a cease-fire with Israel which, though there have been breaches, has been in the main respected by both sides. At the time of writing this post, the long-term fate of this cease-fire remains uncertain. If the maintenance of the cease-fire depends on the ability of the new regime to prevent potentially lethal border incursions by any of its anti-Israel factions, should we be praying for the welfare of the coalition if Israeli lives depend on it?

There is a further point to consider. The once-thriving Syrian Jewish community effectively vanished in 1992 when the father of the current President permitted the last remaining 4,000 Jews to emigrate on condition that they did not make aliyah. Most settled in the United States. Might they respond to the clarion call of the coalition: “To the displaced all over the world, free Syria awaits you”? In the event that they are tempted to return (and we Jews have returned to many countries that sought to eliminate us), we would need to ask what this means to us. Does this mishnah address only the needs of the country in which we live, or does it speak also to those countries in which our brethren live and in which their welfare and safety depend on enforcement of the rule of law by a government with integrity?

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Praying for the welfare of a bad government

Rabbi Chanina, Deputy of the Kohanim, says: “Pray for the welfare (literally 'peace') of the government since, if it were not for fear of it, a man would swallow his neighbour alive" (Avot 3:2). In principle this sounds perfectly sensible. A government that cannot govern is a recipe for a failed state. Its rule generates anarchy, chaos and the often devastating consequences when individuals and communities have to fend for themselves, taking the law -- or more properly the absence of law -- into their own hands.

But things are never as simple as they seem. Does one pray for the peace of the realm when the government is oppressive, corrupt, selfish and immoral? Opinions are divided. Rabbi Marc D. Angel, for example, writes:

"...praying for the welfare of the government is relevant only if the government itself is just. If the government is immoral, one certainly should not pray for its welfare" (The Koren Pirkei Avot, 2015).

Against this, it is worth considering the background to this teaching. Rabbi Chanina lived, and died, at a time of chaos and anarchy, when the Romans occupied the whole of Israel and the Levant; they were therefore the ruling power in Israel itself. Nowhere in Israel was more anarchic than Jerusalem, where the power struggle between different religious and nationalist factions resulted in the great tragedy of Jew-on-Jew murders, these being deaths that the Roman governors had no great interest in preventing. The Jewish authorities too were powerless to stop this carnage. Indeed, it was a sorry reflection of those troubled times that the members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court, absented themselves from the Lishkat HaGazit (the Chamber of Hewn Stone, from which place alone capital cases could be tried) so that they would not be able to pass the death sentence on Jewish murderers. This decision was arguably taken on the basis that, since so many Jewish lives were already being lost and the death penalty was no longer an effective deterrent, it was folly to address the escalating mortality rate among Rome’s Jewish subjects by killing even more of them. If one is to pray for the welfare of only a good government, we may well ask whether Rabbi Chanina was ever able to follow his own advice.

Rabbi Marcus Lehmann (The Lehmann-Prins Pirkei Avoth (Feldheim, 1992) takes the view that Rabbi Chanina's teaching does indeed apply to corrupt governments. One does not pray, of course, that their leaders and functionaries should succeed in their evil, but that they should mend their ways and govern justly. This is reflected in the classic formula of the prayer for the Queen found in the British Authorised Daily Prayer Book:

“May [God] in his mercy put a spirit of wisdom and understanding into her heart, and into the hearts of all her counsellors, that they may uphold the peace of the realm, advance the welfare of the nation, and deal kindly and justly with all the House of Israel.” 

This formulation does not endorse the errors and follies of the government. It does however invoke God's mercy -- and it also acknowledges that wisdom and understanding are gifts from God, gifts of which many governments throughout the world are sorely in need.